"... the Holy Ghost witnesseth in every city..." - Acts 20:23
he first
time it happened it was in the classroom.
I was pickin’ trash up off the floor after all the students had left at
the end of the day. For no
particular reason I happened to turn a scrap of magazine over in my hand before
droppin’ it into the garbage can an’ low and behold what do you figger I
saw? Yup. Jesus.
I don’t know
how it got there. Probably some
student used the cut-out on his or her presentation board and it flaked off and
got left on my classroom floor.
But there it was in my hand, a ragged scrap of paper with a photographic-image
of Jesus hanging on the cross printed on it in brilliant grayscale. I stood there for a long moment, my
hand poised over the trashcan.
Then I realized I just couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t throw Jesus in the trash. Not even a scrappy magazine cutting of
Jesus.
Above the
dry-erase board in my classroom there were some clips so I reached up and
slipped Jesus into one of the clips.
And there he stayed for some time.
I’m not quite certain when he disappeared (probably during interim
cleaning or some such occasion) but it wasn’t before students on numerous
occasions made audible inferences about me and my spiritual positioning based
soley on the Jesus cut out hanging there.
Before Jesus
disappeared from the dry-erase board clip, however, there was another
incident. This time it was behind
the Atomic Cycles bicycle shop in Van Nuys. I had ridden in to participate in the Tuesday Night BMX
cruise the shop’s owner, Paul, coordinates. We all waited in the parking lot behind the shop while Paul
closed up and lo and behold what do you suppose transpired?
Let me tell
you. As I was loitering in the
parking lot, its disintegrating asphalt layers broken by weed-choked cracks, I
noticed a reflective flash from amongst the blades of green. I leaned over and withdrew a tiny
object from the crack’s resident clump and found myself in possession of a tiny
redwood necklace-style cross adorned with a simple metal frame. Now, I’m not much for simple crucifixes,
bein’ leary of Tamus an’ all that, and I was ready to toss the jewelry back
down into its parking lot hiding place but then a notable event happened. I rolled the cross between my thumb and
forefinger and, as the charm rotated, guess what was revealed to me that was adorning
the side that had been hidden from me?
Yup. Jesus.
There he
was, in extreme miniature, cast out of some shiny metal, arms outstretched
across the tiny cross I had picked up from the parking lot. Again I stood there for a long moment,
my hand poised to flick the object back into the weeds pressing upwards from
the cracked parking lot. But I
just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t
toss Jesus away like that. The
other BMXers chided me when I told them what was going on, of course, but I
slipped Jesus into my bicycle bag and carried him there until that bag was lost
years later.
However, my
story ain’t finished. Jesus showed
up yet again. One day some
students in my classroom, boys, were attempting to operate a below the radar
ruckus but their stifled giggling and frantic gestures between one another
quickly brought down my wrath. I
saw they were passing a piece of paper between each other, placing it back and
forth on one another’s desks where the recipient would quickly attempt to bestow
it upon another participant in the fracas. I confiscated the missive without breaking teaching stride,
much to their curious glee I noted, and when I looked into my hand to determine
what I had picked up, guess what I saw?
Yup. Jesus.
The young fellers
had been passin’ back a forth a Catholic prayer card. You know, one of them Jesus, the Divine Mercy “Jesus I Trust
in You” type cards. And there on
the card, in full brilliant color, were Jesus descendin’ from the clouds, his
heart shootin’ forth them beams of spiritual illumination. The boys had obviously been passin’ it
back-and-forth because none of them were comfortable hangin’ onto it but none
of them had the nerve to dispose of it in some way either. And so it came to be in my
possession. And I don’t have a
very good track record with these things as you’ve probably noted.
The culprits
eyed me with humorous anticipation, obviously waitin’ to see what I would do
with the object that they themselves had been hard pressed to deal with in what
felt to them an appropriate manner.
And again I stood there, this time with the Jesus card in my hand,
considering what to do with it myself.
Finally, I
looked up at them and rolled my eyes, sayin’, “Sorry, gentlemen, but I just
can’t throw away Jesus” and I slipped the card into my breast pocket and
continued with class.
Driving home
that day I found that card in my pocket and, for lack of any better solution, I
slipped it into the molding on the dashboard of my car. Where it still sits, Jesus eyeing me
speculatively every time I drive, his hand raised in holy gesture and the
Heavenly beams of comfort shining forth from his heart.
And the
moral to this story is that “you never know what it is you’re going to pick
up.”
Okay,
okay. It’s probably more something
along the lines of “when Jesus is trying to get yer attention, it’s
unmistakable.”
Yup.